Am I the only one here who can't stand HN's AI obsession?

There are plenty of us. Before AI, it was blockchain and web3. Before that, it was virtual reality. Before that, it was 3D printing. Before that... you get the idea. HN has always reflected the latest hype train. It's always been that way.

Look, I won't try to convince you're wrong. But if you come to a website with thousands of active users and ask: Do you agree with me? Don't reply if not.

What do you expect? Might as well ask an AI to generate that text, same level of information you'll be getting.

Why are tech people obsessed with the most cutting edge tech we have.. yeah I wonder why.

If you would've asked experts 6 months before chatgpt when we'd have the current capabilities they would've said we're at least 10 years away.

It's not just HN. It's the whole industry.

I'm a freelancer and all of my clients talk is AI. I think, it's cool tech, but also quite overhyped.

But I get it, AI has become the magic box that the masses of "idea guys" can use to realize "the next big thing". No more meddling with devs or designers.

Whelp, guess we have to wait for the valley of disillusionment.

One mitigating control for Hype Of The Year is to use uBlock and add custom rules in Addons -> uBlock Preferences -> My Rules.

Examples change as desired:

    # Filter some topics
    # top (title / url)
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(lockchain|coin|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr)
    # bottom (stats / comments)
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing span.titleline > a:has-text(/(lockchain|coin|202[3-9]$)/):upward(tr) + *
    #

Same. I really don't care about any of this stuff.

I am not a luddite by any means, I constantly keep trying out LLMs in order to see if I am missing anything. I am trying to get some utility from them, but I just can't.

"But you can use them to generate code", no, not really. First of all, why would I want to generate code? Code is a liability, I want less code, not more. Also, code is very expressive, I can say exactly what I want in code much more effectively than I can try to explain in English to an LLM. The LLM always misunderstands and generates garbage, garbage that takes more time for me to read, understand and fix, compared to simply writing it in the first place.

"Ah, but you can generate the boring stuff, boilerplate, stuff like that". I don't write any boilerplate, any repetitive things I automate by pricipled things, like more abstract code or by using my very effective text editor skills. Trivial code is easy to get right, by definition, why would I risk getting it wrong by using an LLM?

I do get some utility out of LLMs by asking questions about stuff I don't know about. The LLM's answers are almost always wrong, but they can push me in the right direction by informing me of things I am not aware of. This is not really a feature of LLMs, it's just that Google has become garbage at searching. So yes, LLMs are useful, but only by accident.

Generative "art"... miss me with all that.

I couldn't care less for some of the "generative AI" articles on here, but I do like some papers or research that is posted here which I find interesting, even though I don't always fully understand them.

For example, here are a couple from my HN favorites list, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of these articles:

* An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for LLM Interpretability (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268461)

* Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40429540)

* Refusal in LLMs is mediated by a single direction (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40242939)

Software engineers ignoring AI is like retail ignoring Amazon and the internet.

80% of shopping is done in stores. Off line retail is still quite successful despite Amazon.

But they were successful because they adapted. Most stores that completely ignored the Internet failed. The successful ones adapted.

OTOH The ones that tried competing directly against Amazon failed at a much higher rate.

That suggests the middle road: neither ignoring AI nor embracing it completely. Instead concentrate on the many strengths we have as humans.

I find AI to be mostly overrated but helpful in certain scenarios. It has helped me during my research & provides a different way to lookup for information as compared to traditional search engines.

But I don't find its generative capabilities to be all that impressive. It is generic and uninspired at least in text generation. I feel the same way about most new things that are emerging out of the tech scene since Blockchain. I dont even bother with tech news nowadays.

AIs adoption has been quite fast though. Unlike blockchain that never went mainstream AI has captured the casual user segment. It's being used everywhere from recruiting to emails. In offices and in schools. It's hyped alright but real people are using it.

I’m AI-obsessed and have been since forever (mid-1990s). I’m longing for AGI, so I tend to consume every piece of content that looks like an advance or is related to AI business.

AI-related content is seasonal. This new LLM trend (which is now shifting towards “agentic AI”) will eventually fade and be replaced by another shiny new term. Basically, there’s a lot of noise, but every now and then, some gems pop up. Finding those articles is the fun part and the reason why I visit HN every day.

Some of these AI articles discuss ways to make progress towards the most important technology humans have created in terms of productivity gains. I love these. Others are cheap pitches of a minor hack from somebody trying to make a buck; they are predictable, thus boring, but hard to avoid, just like noise in a city. In my opinion the quality of HN comments and votes has been losing steam over the last few years especially since a large chunk of reddit migrated here a couple years ago; the commentary used to be more insightful than the articles themselves on many topics, now the commentary is also noisy and often boring (thankfully, it still contains many hidden gems).

Look, I'm in my late thirties and only now got the whole magnets, coils and electronics fun. Others did that shit when they were toddlers.

Aside from the fact that a ton of people here make money with AI or are or will be heavily invested in AI, there's just the curiosity factor, that I had and then lost to the reasons you described and many more.

My brain clicked in the past three days, and it's annoying that people didn't explain it properly but waited until I reasoned myself into it. It makes me angry and I'm gonna build a tiny potato canon this summer and hunt them down :P (I'm not, but I never build one, so ...)

Humans take a lot of wrong turns in their lives and it's important not to take that the wrong way. Envy is brutal and makes people do buttloads of dumb stuff and among those things are all those AI enhancers and data krakens build on top of GPT and of course all those people who create content and make those this-is-not-marketing videos ... but they all serve some customers, and of course, some Ponzis.

It rarely is what it is in this digital world, just as it always has been on any consumer markets. Honesty? Every single person and supplier counts.

Is it all pathetic? Is pathetic bad from all POVs?

A lot of people do it to pussy-grab money out of gullible people and if you really want to to get the benefits of AI, use it to hack these people and take em out of their fraudulent businesses so they have a reason to get and build better or pivot the fuck away.

A friend of mine once told me, don't get upset about other people's passion. Just bet your own money instead. If you don't like the AI obsession, short the AI stocks, or invest in something else.

The comments before mine certainly point out that many dislike the hype topics.

I think these hype topics are inherent to HN though, given that the org is fundamentally a venture capital financial institution.

By nature, VC is always riding a wave of hype. Investors put money into a startup in hopes that it generates returns like the next singer on stage in her underwear.

The industry could support smaller returns from thousands of smaller startups, but the big payoff comes with investment in the next big superstar.

These are the same financial forces that guide massive industry consolidation.

Who actually likes goggle today? Investors...

Not the only one, but to be honest, I also find most of SaaS-related content boring. Technically interesting content is as rare as it was, there is definitely some though, which I'd why I am here.

The same thing happens over and over again, because of the noise and interruption, we escape from fb, x, ig, which we were once passionate about, from blackhat, from everywhere, but in fact, it is just from a filled cesspit, temporarily Jump into a niche shithole that hasn’t been filled (yet), and the cycle begins over and over again. Relatively speaking, I think HN is not a cesspit because of its retro interface and unfriendly operation. That is great! !

AI is a neutral primitive; a new type of compute. It will be applied in both positive & negative ways. Man I’m still deciding if the internet, as a whole, has been a net benefit to society & culture. Now we’ll need to figure that out for AI, too.

Genetics research, especially for more rare conditions with less traditional research funding, is one application where I can’t help but feel excitement.

AI image & song generation in the style of a popular artist is one application where I only feel sadness.

It's a next token predictor capable of some impressive stuff, but there's no intelligence behind it. You will never find a novel idea from an LLM.

Like so many successful applications of computers it's a new way of taking a monotonous task and grinding through it quickly. In this way I think it's different from some previous fads (e.g. block chain) and there is real utility.

I agree though that it's exhausting to read people anthropomorphize and hype it up.

I find AI to be fascinating because of humankind's old dream to create intelligent life in a machine. Just watch the countless old and new movies and animes or read the novels².

With big advances, the current wave of AI is finally promising to turn this dream into reality.

Besides, it's already quite useful even with its current shortcomings.

--

² here's a short very incomplete list:

The Matrix, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, Her, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2004, 2017), Data in Star Trek, Star Wars, ...

I agree. I'm not interested that much in AI. Mostly I use it too make boring or complex SQL queries and regexes, which are wrong 50% of the time.

I see people here using those LLMs on their machine etc, I have no idea what they're doing with it or how any of that works.

Or writing prompts all day doesn't seem fun.

The paradox is that I work at a AI startup with a real product, with real clients ;)

So I don't think it's a fad and as a developper you have to stay alert on the effects it has on your profession.

AI is not useless NFTs.

I do understand you there, and think AI is a bit overblown. A lot of use cases for it seem to be more about using AI for AI's sake, not because it really revolutionises anything.

But at the same time, I don't think Hacker News is that heavily flooded with AI related posts. In the 30 posts I see on the home page, 3 are AI related, with one being this post complaining about it. The next page of posts has even less, with only 1 or so post about an AI related topic.

I'm not sure if you've read many comments on here but there seem to be more people railing against generative AI than there are those sharing useful and interesting stories or critiques. It's one of the reasons I've been spending less time here, I used to be able to rely on HN for interesting perspectives on both cutting edge and historical tech related topics, often seeing insights from people sharing practical knowledge that was hard to find elsewhere. For the past year or two it's taken a hard turn towards a very spiteful and shallow gripe fest that feels like the same thing that happened to Reddit years ago when it took off in popularity. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me why people are coming here to complain about technology and it just adds a bunch of noise that you need to sift through if you are interested in the tech being discussed. Feels more like people fishing for upvotes by sharing their "hot take" which inevitably a cookie cutter opinion that you see all over social media without any original thought behind it.

Started with yes and no, but thinking more of it, basically yes.

I’m interested in AI tech (not philosophy or prophecies). But HN isn’t that great of a source for tech details. Reddit and local boards helped much more.

At the same time I have to ignore lots of shallow startups and react form developers 10x productivity reports, cause that sparks no interest.

Currently on the front page there are ~2/30 posts on the front page.

AI hype is everywhere. On HN there is genuinely much higher quality conversation about AI than many other places.

So, no, the question in the title doesn't resonate with me. I don't think there is an obsession, and for the AI discussion happens, I'm happy with the quality of it.

HN, or at least part of the user base, is always getting over-excited about some fad or other. As others have mentioned, there was also blockchain (a few iterations of this one), metaverses, more AI (there was a computer vision bubble a while back), thorium... There'll be another along sooner or later.

If it were just transforming text into an image, I agree it would be overblown.

But if you follow the thread to the end, this is the beginning of something that will change everything, probably more than the Industrial Revolution even.

most people I know who used to browse hn have left because of this (I am not exaggerating), and I barely ever look at it either anymore, so asking here is probably gonna give you a biased view.

I find AGI fascinating. Generating bad airbrush art and crappy prose to be summarized badly by another vastly inefficient machine wasting energy on a dying planet so more douchebags desperate to have their very own Smaug horde of gold have another bandwagon to leap on? Not so much.

The only thing I even remotely use AI for is Codeium in VS Code and that's almost entirely as autocomplete - every time I've tried to use it to generate anything more than a simple function I end up spending as much time going through it and rewriting it to suit my needs as I would have just writing it myself in the first place.

I like writing code, the same way I like writing prose and music and drawing. I will never want or need AI to do these things for me and, if I'm being honest, I'm always gonna be a snob to people who do.

If you don't care about the act of creation and the process of learning how to do it, what's the point? To "generate content"? To make money? Go be a prostitute then, if money is all you care about.

Maybe a life focused on efficiency of generating content works for some people but, fuck me, I'd rather gouge my own eyes out with a spoon.

So yeah, totally with you.

Yes, I feel the same way. The lack of critical thinking about AI is almost shocking… and then I remember how messed up humans are and it doesn’t seem shocking, just depressing.

I use these tools with the same caution with which I use Wikipedia.

They’re all great to get you started on a (re)search path provided you take care to validate the information so easily acquired.

At least behind all hype generative AI has some real beneficial use cases, unlike blockchain which is mainly used for drug trade, tax evasion and speculative investment.

I'm just sick of the hype.

its a fascinating and useful tool, but its no silver bullet. Calm down and carry on people, less froth (I'm looking at YOU Microsoft!).

Related:

Fucking Tired of AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286049

My wish is that those of us sick of the hype would start calling it ChadGPT, to give it the respect that it deserves!

Yes, people that say they use AI every day are embarrassing to me. I've never been able to replicate it's usefulness and have actively tried. I can only imagine at this point that they are either delusional, lying, or their job is actually that easy.

Don't worry, you are in good company among the many who are also sure of what they think they see.

It’s a combinator. Most people’s passive income here depends on AI stocks.

I should post my take on this substituting Rust for AI ;)

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. [...] If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

I flagged this submission for this reason.

Frankly, HN has moderate with the amount of AI spam compared to other technical sources I happen to brief through. And comments often are refreshing in keeping the hype mood somewhat down.

Lots of people got into IT-related stuff vaguely because they liked the idea of AI. For a very long time it was only a dream, now it's becoming reality, and I'm pretty sure it's a big part of the excitement.

Of course there is a lot of lame content and grifting around this, but I'm pretty sure this is not another Web3.0 nft crypto hype wave, this is here to stay and expand.

they will change their mind when they are all unemployed.

There are three things you can expect from HN:

* People who like AI or China or Trump or Apple.

* People who hate AI or China or Trump or Apple.

You see AI slammed as much as it is glorified here. And AI is the topic of the industry today, it would be like shoving your head in the the ground if you ignored it.

Why is this, again, flagged? (if not proving the point it aims to discuss)

This website is about money, dude

It is mostly a marketing gimmick. Tech companies want people to believe that their models can do "anything", even become conscious. Anyone who understands the technology can see that this is nonsense. But they'll continue to repeat this while the money is coming, so unsuspecting investors will poor more and more money into AI companies.

I don't mind the AI stuff but find the censoring of conservative voices extremely disappointing.

"Am I the only one here who can't stand HN's AI obsession?"

Nope.

Someone took an HN poll last year and a majority agreed "AI" is overhyped.

Honestly your post is worthless. You are asking why a tech focused forum has posts about a specific tech field that has seen advancements in recent time. You don’t even know elaborate beyond saying they are boring and lame.

I see your opinion a lot here on HN and I wonder if there is a segment of the population in this field who choose to stick their head in the sand? No doubt there is a lot of hype that won’t materialize but unlike some of the other hype cycles, people are starting to see a value from this current cycle already. Certainly at the bleeding edge the cost may exceed the value but it’s only a matter of time before those costs get eaten away.

So no, I don’t understand your feelings, I am excited for the future and if something gets posted on HN that I don’t like, I don’t read or upvote it.

Me personally? I'm more tired of the constant whining and moaning about how horrible AI is